12 Days of Christmas: Japan
The 3rd country we visited in 2024
The third country we visited this year was Japan! After our time in Thailand in late January, we “needed” to get to Argentina, as it was one of the countries we were considering for a long-term stay, so evaluating it sooner than later was important. But we were quite literally on the other side of the world. How to get there?! We considered going down to Australia and New Zealand and then over, as Oceania was on our bucket list (and still is). Costs were crazy high to go that way.
The other option was to head back through the US and then down. And if we went through the US, we may as well stop in Japan because it was basically on the way. I had been wanting to go to Japan ever since I turned down a job teaching Business English there in 2009, so I pushed for that option and that’s where we went. We arrived the night of February 2.
Originally we were just going to spend ~5 days in Tokyo and then had to the US. But we loved Japan. So we added on another ~5 days in Kyoto and at that point we all wanted to stay longer to explore more of the country but, since Japan isn’t a country we can easily get residency in, we had to table our desire to explore, knowing we could come back one day. Le sigh.
Highlights in Tokyo:
Figuring out how to eat hot pot despite the language barrier
Seeing Shelby’s friend, Aimee; meeting her family and exploring part of the city with them
Dressing up in kimono
Snow!
Views from the Tokyo Skytree
Cooking class in someone’s private home
Eating strawberries during peak season
Riding the metro (soooo quiet)
Toilets
Highlights in Kyoto:
Crab kaiseki
Korean BBQ
Visiting various parks and shrines, including Fushimi Inari Taisha
Bike riding
Ninja “school”
Overall impressions: So advanced, so clean, so quiet, so orderly! The metro and the Shinkansen arrive exactly on time, people bike everywhere, kids navigate places on their own (even from a young age), food actually isn’t super expensive (and you can eat well from convenience stores). Overall we were blown away and Japan is at the top of our list of places we visited. We would go back in a heartbeat, as there are so many places we’d love to explore there. We’d need several weeks, though, at least! Hopefully we can make it happen in the next couple of years.